Forty minutes off the plane, we sat in a phone bank lounge area, doing everything short of creating a human pyramid to try and get a good WiFi signal. The young boy jumping around nearby with more energy than the entire blue-shirt wearing tour group could muster would probably have helped us out.

We were in Rome. And all that stood between us and a bed were sufficient directions from the airport to our little rental apartment. Not impossible. Unless you can’t speak the language, read the signs or generally navigate a wholly foreign metropolis. Oh, and you have no sustainable access to the internet for maps and translations and route info. Listen, sometimes you make plans with great efficiency and sometimes you have just finished enjoying your wedding day, moving into a new little cottage and crossing the globe to a whole other continent for a two-week honeymoon. As such, we may not have given our travel plans the attention they deserved.

We did eventually make it to our apartment. We may have taken a few wrong turns. And there could have been a brief moment when I sat down on top of my luggage and declared that Dan should just “leave me here to die.” (Not my finest hour.) But, we found it. And then such a glorious time we had wandering all around Rome. After we slept for about a billion hours.

Rome. It’s a beauty of a place. And also chaotic, and messy. Endless in its surprises and sheer masses of humanity. A vibrant collection of personal and magnificent histories. It was a city that affected me in a way I didn’t expect. Somewhere in its cobblestones and alleys and churches and cuisine we stitched together a pilgrimage. It proved to be the perfect first leg of our grand European adventure.